Industrialization

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “industry” probably originated from the 14th-century French word industrie and initially meant “intelligent or clever working; skill, ingenuity, dexterity, or cleverness in doing anything” (Oxford English Dictionary [2012], Industry). The word industrialization appears to have been first coined in 1906 to describe “the process of industrializing or fact of being industrialized; also, the conversion of an organization into an industry” (Oxford English Dictionary [2012], Industrialization). The connotation and denotation of the term still embody perceptions of knowledge and levels of skill and loom large in the history of industrialization. In the early 21st century industrialization is explicitly associated with the movement from a predominantly agrarian and handicraft economy to centralized production and machine manufacture. Great Britain was said to be first to experience this transition between c. 1760 and 1830. The British Industrial Revolution has long been seen as the spark to modern industrialization and the commencement of sustained economic growth. In the early 21st century there is far from a consensus over what triggered this revolutionary leap into the modern economic world, but the ghost of Britain’s manufactured past still haunts the halls of economic development, from the type of institutions and culture needed to an evangelical promotion of free trade. In concrete terms this means the need for some form of elected parliament, a national bank, protection of property rights, a limited state, and an emphasis on individualism. However, accompanying the rise of the newly industrializing East there has been a movement away from an Anglocentric focus on industrialization to a much more global emphasis and the underlining of contingent factors.